I am Kin Lane, the API Evangelist...

This is my online domain where I work to understand the world of the Application Programming Interfaces, also known as APIs. This new way of sharing data using the web is touching almost every aspect of our increasingly digital lives, providing access to the bits and bytes that make our personal and professional worlds go round.

This is my research specifically into the microservices evolution of the API conversation. I'm looking to understand the variety of philosophies that surround the microservices world, and the realities of it on the ground in companies and organizations of all shapes and sizes.

API Evangelist is a network of data driven projects and APIs which I curate and manage as part of this ongoing research, hoping to provide easy access to the moving parts of my work. Everything you see here runs on Github, making everything forkable, and reusable for both humans and machines.

API Evangelist Partners

These are my partners who invest in API Evangelist each month, helping underwrite my research, and making sure I'm able to keep monitoring the API space as I do.

Laura will be talking about tooling for mocking microservice endpoints in a meaningful way using Open API specifications. She will cover how to set up microservice deployments processes so that with each versioned microservice deployed a mock of the service with up to date contracts will also be deployed. Laura will also show how to use tooling she and her team built to consume these lightweight mocks in unit tests and either get default mock responses or mock out custom responses for different test cases.

In an era where many API development groups are working to move to a design and mock first approach, this session will be key to our journey, and APIStrat is where we all need to be. You can register for the event here, and there are still sponsorship opportunities available. Don’t miss out on APIStrat this year–it is going to be a good time in Nashville as we continue the conversation we started back in 2012 with the initial edition of the API industry event in New York City.

API Microservices News

These are the news items I've curated in my monitoring of the API space that have some relevance to the API definition conversation and I wanted to include in my research. I'm using all of these links to better understand how the space is testing their APIs, going beyond just monitoring and understand the details of each request and response.

If you think there is a link I should have listed here feel free to tweet it at me, or submit as a Github issue. Even though I do this full time, I'm still a one person show, and I miss quite a bit, and depend on my network to help me know what is going on.

API Microservices Organizations

These are the organizations I come across in my research who are doing interesting things in the API space. They could be companies, institutions, government agencies, or any other type of organizational entity. My goal is to aggregate so I can stay in tune with what they are up to and how it impacts the API space.

Wercker is a continuous delivery platform focusing on changing the way developers build and deploy their applications. This platform was built in order to make developers' lives easier and enabling them to move fast and make things.

HashiCorp is a company based in San Francisco that solves development, operations, and security challenges in infrastructure so organizations can focus on business-critical tasks. HashiCorp builds tools to ease these decisions by presenting solutions that span the gaps. Our tools manage both physical machines and virtual machines, Windows, and Linux, SaaS and IaaS, etc. And we're committed to supporting next-generation technologies, as well.

A Micro-Services toolkit for Node.js. This toolkit lets you write clean code that you can scale without needing to refactor. Start with everything in one process, and split it all out onto multiple systems when you need to.

Painlesss isolation for your (micro)service development process. Dockpit makes it trivial to develop your (micro)service in isolation. It mocks the APIs you depend on and puts data stores, message queus and service registries in predictable states.

Microservices at your fingertips. no provisioning or deployments required. give your IoT device compute super powers. Run code in response to events. Your microservice up in less than 7 seconds. Use our awesome CLI to spin a service in seconds. You can also integrate with your favourite CI/CD solution for automated deployments. Run your code with just an HTTPS call. As simple as that. Your mobile or IoT device gets compute superpowers.

hook.io is the leading open-source provider of microservice and webhook hosting. Our service is built with by Developers for Developers. hook.io provides free hosting for Microservices and Webhooks. These hosted services have full integrated access to the hook.io Developer API.

We started Magnetic.io because we were fed up with the way online systems are built in the typical enterprise. Enterprises are held hostage by long and slow development projects that result in high risk, big-bang releases. This kills innovation and stifles change. It is our mission to change this: Magnetic.io is dedicated to developing solutions that enable and stimulate innovation and change, while reducing risk and cost.

Micro is an ecosystem which provides the fundamental building blocks for developing and managing distributed systems. Technology is rapidly evolving. Cloud computing now gives us almost unlimited scale, however leveraging that scale with existing tools is still difficult. Micro attempts to solve this problem with a developer first focus.

Netsil automatically discovers your application’s topology and builds a map of services and stakeholders so that you can visually locate hotspots and failures faster. There’s no more code instrumentation, no more hunting through manual documentation to understand services and dependencies.Netsil works the way you want to work: quickly, iteratively and collaboratively. Finally, a solution designed for microservices, containers and modern distributed systems. Download Netsil for the monitoring and performance analytics needs of your production applications.

Lattice aspires to make clustering containers easy. Lattice includes a cluster scheduler, http load balancing, log aggregation and health management. Lattice containers can be long running or temporary tasks which get dynamically scaled and balanced across a cluster. Lattice packages components from Cloud Foundry to provide a cloud native platform for individual developers and small teams.

We're making it easy for organizations to accelerate software innovation at scale, with open source infrastructure for microservices. We've been learning from the some of the smartest organizations adopting microservices (industry details here: microservices.com), and applying their lessons learned to our software.

Giant Swarm’s mission is to give developers the power and freedom to build the software that runs the world. Giant Swarm transforms the world towards microservices. Organizations work with Giant Swarm to easily build, deploy, and run their containerized microservices without thinking about the underlying infrastructure.

Deploy and manage microservices with power and ease. Vamp, or the Very Awesome Microservices Platform, takes the pain out of running complex and critical service based architectures. Vamp's core features are a platform-agnostic microservices DSL, powerful A-B testing/canary releasing, autoscaling and an integrated metrics & event engine.

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum. Their solution offers users the best capabilities and features of IaaS and PaaS, without the shortcomings or disadvantages of either one.

If you think there is an organization I should have listed here feel free to tweet it at me, or submit as a Github issue. Even though I do this full time, I'm still a one person show, and I miss quite a bit, and depend on my network to help me know what is going on.

API Microservices Tooling

As I study each API, and API related service, I'm always looking for open source tooling that has been developed around each area of the API life cycle. This is an aggregate of tooling I've come across and aggregated as part of my API testing research.

The Admin Interface Framework http://www.forestadmin.com/lumber. Lumber is an opensource tool to generate an admin microservice. It serves a REST API hooked directly into your database (MySQL and Postgres for now).

If there is a tool that you think should be listed here, let me know by submitting a Github issue or Tweeting a link at me. I'm always looking for new types of tools, and get better at organizing them here and making sense.

About This Research

As I keep an eye on the space I curate news, bookmark organizations, watch interesting tools, and work to understand what deployment solutions are being applied by leading API providers. I take everything I find and publish here as part of my research.

I then take this research, and what I've learned and publish stories on the blog, and more long form content like my industry guides, and white papers for customers. This is one way that I generate revenue to keep it all going.

If you'd like to see me focus more on microservices I could use more partners investing in this area, helping me find the time to study more about what is going on. Feel free to contact me directly if you want to talk more about microservices.